Author Topic: On Presidential Fiddling....  (Read 1044 times)

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Offline Jeffy

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On Presidential Fiddling....
« on: July 08, 2010, 07:40:39 PM »
http://news-political.com/2010/06/17/on-presidential-fiddling-useful-idiots-free-speech-and-american-radicalism/

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While I have not posted in a while (mostly because I find the current political situation depressing), I have been cataloging irritations. Here are four that have been on my mind over the last month or so.

1) President Nero Fiddles While Rome Burns. The best analysis of President Hussein’s Oil Crisis speech that I’ve heard came from Larry Gatlin, guest-hosting for Don Imus on “Imus in the Morning,” who said it amounted to Obama saying: “By G_d, I’m gonna tell you somethin’ son, and it starts with I’m’a gonna.”

That’s about all it amounts to, and that’s about all Hussein’s presidency has amounted to. As Dick Morris has said, Obama and his entire posse are academics and analysts; not a one of them knows how to manage. Hence, Obama probably had an early meeting in which he asked, “Are we addressing the oil spill? Are we making progress?” and got honest yeses in response.

But an experienced manager would have asked, “What progress are we making? How much containment? What resources are at our disposal? How many booms? How many ships? Who is the foremost expert in the world on oil leak remediation and how quickly can we get him/her on-scene?”

That’s the difference between someone who is ready to answer the phone at 3 a.m. and our current “leadership” corps (that’s pronounced “core”, by the way, not “corpse,” President smartest-man-in-the-room-ivy-league-graduate).

Penn Jillete, the Las Vegas magician of Penn & Teller fame, has become something of a political commentator in recent years. He said (also on an Imus show – I’m watching too much Imus…) that to have radio personalities inviting the general public to offer ideas on how to solve the oil leak crisis is equivalent to inviting the public to tell surgeons how to operate. He’s right. However, the problem is that the Hussein administration is not letting the surgeons run the operation they’re experts in – in fact, he’s made it perfectly clear that he doesn’t trust the oil spill surgeons. He trusts lawyers, academics and bureaucrats, and has inserted them between the surgeons and the surgery; between the doctor (drilling experts) and the patient (the oil pipe).

Come to think of it, he’s doing exactly the same with the economy and the new National Health Care plan. In all cases, the patient is bleeding out while Obama conducts studies, academic analyses and public opinion campaigns. And then heads off to play on the basketball court or to hobnob at one of his weekly or twice-weekly multi-million dollar, star-studded White House parties.

The neglect has got to be intentional. Hail Ceasar!

2) “Useful Idiot” Defined. In his “presidential” Address, Mr. O made a statement that left even committed Leftists nonplussed. He said: “What has defined us as a nation since our founding is the capacity to shape our destiny; our determination to fight for the America we want for our children, even if we’re unsure exactly what that looks like. And if we don’t know yet precisely how we’re going to get there, we know we’ll get there. It’s a faith in the future that sustains us as a people.” (Quote begins about 4 ½ minutes from the end of the speech.)

What bothered even Leftists was the vague nature of several phrases, such as: “Our determination to fight for the America we want…even if we’re unsure exactly what it looks like.” Even Leftists are wondering: Who among us doesn’t have a pretty clear picture of what future we want for our children?

Or the vagueness of: “And even if we don’t know yet precisely how we’re going to get there, we know we’ll get there.” That reminds me of the Yogi Berra saying, if you don’t know where you’re going any road will get you there. Is that what the President is saying? That Americans typically have no idea how to get from here to the future they’d like for their children, but they’re confident that whatever road they take it will get them there?

Who is that stupid?

Yes, it’s true that if you don’t know what the future you want looks like, you can take any approach to get “there,” wherever “there” is. But if you do have an idea of what you want the future of America to look like for your children, you also know what road will get you there, and what roads will lead you off in wrong directions.

Is the President really so clueless that he doesn’t know what future he wants, or know that we have visions of our own that we want for our children? Even his Leftist buddies have trouble with that bit of rhetoric; even his Leftist buddies have an idea of the future they want for their children and hence what road(s) will take them there, and which won’t.

But this is precisely what makes them Useful Idiots: they think the President is heading for a specific future, like they are, and that his goals are at least aligned to theirs. They’re wrong – because he’s a Socialist/Communist True Believer, and such True Believers have a different agenda than do Useful Idiot Leftists.

True Socialists/Communists (like Alinsky and the Leninists of old) know that the socialist/communist revolution is a continual process of perfecting society. It’s never finished. And the population has to be kept in a state of perpetual unease and unsettledness in order to prevent old bourgeois patterns from re-asserting themselves if they are going to successfully refashion the minds of the masses.

See, from a True Believer perspective, any achieved goal creates contentment, and contentment with the status quo is bourgeois. Therefore, even the Useful Idiot Leftists are bourgeois at heart, and have to be taken in hand and forced along the radical path that’s at the heart of Progressivism.

Progressivism at its core is a process, not a target – because the perfect society is ultimately unachievable. Truly, for the Progressive the medium is the message, and the means is the end. There is no end of the road, no identifiable “there.” It is the movement of constant experimentation. That’s why it isn’t important to a Progressive whether a particular program makes things better or worse; the journey is the purpose. And Progressives don’t give up on their ideology even though they consistently fail to improve conditions, because the experiment is the agenda, not improved lives. In fact, failing to improve lives, creating conditions of sustained anxiety and deprivation, helps break down bourgeois sentimentality. And it’s not important how many lives are damaged or cut short, or whether the result of a program corresponds to its intention; individuals are expendable in the battle for social transformation.

But transformation toward what? “We’re unsure exactly what it looks like,” President Obama says, “or precisely how we’re going to get there.” But “we know we’ll get there.”

Really? How do we know we’ll get there if we don’t know what it looks like or what will get us there? Well, we have faith, “a faith in the future that sustains us.” A faith that looks an awful lot like blind stupidity, but is really a Marxist version of faith; it’s a materialist’s “faith” in the presumed dialectic of history that is believed to inexorably lead social evolution toward some unknown, but historically inevitable, future. The purpose of the True Believer is to prevent humanity from settling for anything less than that ultimate future, by destabilizing and destroying human social structures and traditional relationships.

There is nothing humane or sentimental about the Progressive agenda. It is finally nihilistic. True Progressives do not believe in conventional notions of “the good” or even of what we generally consider to be “moral.” For them morality is aligning oneself with the presumed historical process of social evolution toward an unknown and therefore ultimately unachievable social future. People will be hurt along the way; lives will necessarily be foreshortened; freedoms will be denied; coercion will be implemented. The self-anointed True Believers will practice purely utilitarian force to prevent sentimental attachments to “historically obsolete” values, relationships, and social structures in order to clear the way for the future: which is whatever comes next. And by virtue of coming next, it is automatically and necessarily “good.”

But the Useful Idiot Leftists are sentimentalists at heart: they want to do “good” things for the poor and dispossessed, for animals and the environment. And while that’s not the agenda of the True Believer, the True Socialist/Marxist will use the bourgeois sentimentality of Useful Idiots to help destabilize society – then turn on those idealistic fellow-travelers once their services are no longer needed.

Most of the media, cultural elite, and despisers of American Society are Useful Idiots – with an emphasis on idiot, because they’re really not all that useful in the long run, and can’t see that they will be dispossessed if the Socialist/Communist revolution succeeds.

Obama, however, is a True Believer surrounded by True Believers. If they seem detached it’s because they are. They don’t care about individual human life, only the march of history is sacred – and being among those who benefit from it, regardless of where it is going. They recognize no bourgeois moral boundaries; indeed, they trend toward the sociopathic.

3) You Do Not Have the Right to Express Yourself on My Time. In the news: two high school teachers protested at a school rally honoring a half dozen graduating Seniors who have decided to join the military. Faced with criticism, they claimed to be on an educational mission to show students the value and importance of free speech rights.

Of course, the self-justification is specious. They are engaged in an after-the-fact justification of their pre-event decision that they could not, in good Liberal conscience, allow students to celebrate war and American imperialism without a counter-note. The problem for them is that they engaged in “free speech” while not free to do so. They were at work at the time.

We in the private sector know that we do not have unbridled rights to free speech. When we are on our employers’ clocks, we represent the company and we are limited in what we can do and say. We cannot take stands or express ourselves in ways that harm our employers’ business interests or work contrary to the employer’s public “face.”  But as soon as we’re off the clock, we are free to have our say and engage in our protests and marches.

Public employees are public servants. When they are on the clock they are to serve the public’s interest, not their own. Teachers are not hired to promote a particular political viewpoint or a particular set of social values. They are hired to teach Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic. Because society is highly diverse, these teachers’ employers are highly diverse, and no segment of the public hires servants to bite the hands that feed them. While on the job, public employees need to keep their political and social opinions to themselves. They have all the freedom of any other citizen outside of their time and place of employment; they do not have special dispensation to work against the system that hires them while being paid by that system.

Similarly, I’m sick and tired of hearing performers bash the United States, conservatives, and Republicans in the middle of their performances. When criticized, they typically respond that they have the right to free speech, and they say so in the aggrieved tone of spoiled children who think that those who disagree with them – and perhaps shout them down – should not exercise their right to free speech in response. But when we purchase concert tickets we become the employers of the performers we’ve hired to entertain us, for the duration of the event. We do not have to give someone money and accept abuse in return. When audiences boo or protest the artist who denigrates them and what they hold sacred, they are doing what any business owner or manager would do: they are holding an errant employee accountable, and telling him or her that continuing such behavior will result in being fired.

I say: stop tolerating Useful Idiots. If a public employee or an entertainer insults you and your values while on your clock, let them know that you will not silently accept their put-down. In the case of an entertainer, you might even fire them by marching out to the ticket kiosk and demanding your money back. In the case of a public employee, head in to the Town Manager’s or School Superintendent’s office, or attend a public meeting of the Town or School Board and make your case that as long as an employee is on your dime, he or she doesn’t get to insult you or undermine your values without consequence. And that includes the Superintendent or Board members.

4) Give Me Radicalism, not Progressivism. Arizona stirred the hornet’s nest when the state’s legislature decided to take on border enforcement. Their thinking was simple: if the Feds aren’t going to fulfill their Constitutional duty to defend the national border, then the State would exercise its right to defend its own border. That’s a return, in principle, to the radical nature of the American Revolution, and I salute it.

As our Founders intended it, the Federal government would take on the limited duty of defending the national border because it would ultimately be unwieldy for each border state to defend its own boundaries. This was not a decision to forbid states their natural interest in strong borders, but to shift the burden in personnel and costs to the whole of the country. After all, not every state has a border that delimits the United States of America, and if each border state were left to defend its boundaries by itself, those border states would carry an unequal burden in protecting themselves as well as protecting internal states that would unequally benefit from the expense and risk undertaken by boundary states.

The result, according to The Federalist Papers, would be a tendency of regional states to cooperate together, forming alliances to the potential disunion of the nation. And foreign nations could find ways to exploit the differences in economic well-being of the various states to make war on a weak border state in order to establish a beachhead on the North American continent; or to make a private pact with a weak border state, also to the detriment of the integrity of continental independence from foreign intrigues. (Read Federalist Papers 3 – 8.)

But the refusal of the federal government to take up its Constitutional duty does not mean that states must become passively suicidal. Each state has the right to protect itself. In our Federal system, power flows from the bottom up, and each successively higher level of government faces greater limitations on its power and authority. Hence, the State was meant to be more powerful than the Federal government, except in the limited enumerated matters assigned to the Federal level. (Read Federalist Papers 39.)

On the same basis of State authority, Oklahoma has recognized an internal threat to its State Constitution, to the Federal Constitution, to the separation of Church and State, and to the Enlightenment principles upon which Western Civilization and individual liberty rest, in the trend of Muslim extremists and ideologues to promote Shari‘a law as a legitimate alternative to State and Federal constitutional law. In our system, Oklahoma has the right to govern itself internally, even over/against the desires of the federal government, so long as the limited powers enumerated to the federal government are not trounced as a consequence. Oklahoma has the right to limit non-Constitutional forms of law, and must do so if it is to bear faith with our foremothers and forefathers. (Read Federalist Papers 46.)

It is time for more states to reacquaint themselves with their Constitutional privileges and to act on them. Our Founders intended for the states to counterbalance the federal government in order to keep in check the foreseen tendency of federal office holders to want to accrete power at their rarefied and elevated remove from the People.

To prevent the accretion of power at the Federal level, our Founders intended the Congress to be made up of two kinds of representatives. The House was to be made up of representatives directly elected by the people they represent, the idea being that each representative would be more easily held accountable if they must face their constituents and answer for their actions in Washington DC. Hence, they would represent pockets of local citizens at the Federal level (Read Federalist Papers 52 and following.)

The Senate was to be made up of representatives appointed by each State government, so that the interests of each state would be upheld and promoted in Washington DC. Senators were to be official State representatives, accountable to the elected assembly of their home state, while Congress men and women were to represent the people directly, thus standing over-against the State’s interests, on behalf of their local constituents, at the Federal level even while the Senators stand over/against the Federal level on behalf of State leaders. (Read esp. Federalist Papers 62, but also before and after.)

As part of the Progressive movement to remake the U.S. according to European sentiments, in the early 20th century Senators were transformed into additional representatives of the citizens of their home states, rather than representatives of the State governments. That move was both a consequence and contributor to the continued, gradual denigration of States rights, and needs to be reversed. If the States cannot advocate their independent interests in Washington DC, over/against Federal interests – if, instead, the States’ representatives become complicit in the machinations of the Federal government over/against the rights and powers of their home States qua States, then the current abuses of Federal power and the over-reaching of Federal authority are fore-gone conclusions.

The Federal government is intended to represent the United States to the rest of the world, it is not intended to rule over the States on domestic matters. We need to start moving back toward the truly revolutionary intention of our Founders: that power always move from the bottom up, from the people through their representatives to the States, and from the States to the Federal government; and that, as a consequence, the Federal government always be kept small and relatively impotent to govern within the national boundaries of the United States.

Power up means maximum individual freedom and personal autonomy; power down means limited individual freedom and the loss of personal autonomy. It’s time to reclaim our birthright – not as Van Jones wants, by advocating on the streets for more power to be put into the hands of the President, but as our Founders envisioned: we must reclaim our birthright by advocating for the restoration of the design upon which our nation was founded, which maximizes individual liberty and local government at the expense of Federal authority.


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